notes from meltdown central

Suddenly, everybody's talking about POTS.  Specifically, the infamous Pension Pot of the fortunate Sir Fred.
But there seems to be a lot of confusion about who or what owns the Pot and how it works.
A member of the House of Lords and ex-banker was asked on Saturday by a BBC interviewer if he thought Sir Fred's pension was too big.
In fruity tones he explained, as if talking to an idiot, that when someone's  Pension Pot has eighteen million smackers in it, and he retires at 50,  then £690,000 per year is what automatically comes out of it.
To put this in a bit of perspective, an adult male aged 65 retiring today with £100,000 in his Pot would get a not-so-hearty £7,000 a year based on current actuarial rates.  And if you're a healthy woman of the same age, you'd get even less, given that your life expectancy would be so annoyingly long.
His Lordship's point is that the size of the pension was an inevitable consequence of the size of the Pot and therefore nobody should find it surprising; and what's more as far as His Lordship was concerned, a man's Pot is his Castle, or something of that nature.
A few short years ago as middle-aged panic began to set in, my employer ( another bank) advertised a seminar on pension planning for the over 50s, which I attended.  I was hoping to get some useful tips such as how to avoid having my own tiny little Pot disappear in a puff of green smoke (precisely what it has, unfortunately, now done).  Instead I found myself sitting in a room of embarrassed-looking people being told how to cope with the difficulties of having more than a million pounds in your Pot.   The government had imposed a Lifetime Pension Cap of 1.8 million pounds and some of the people in the room with me were being inconvenienced by this.  I sat there for a while wishing I had their problems and then left before depression set in.
But I would be pleased if someone could explain to me how Sir Fred comes to have eighteen million smackers in his pot.  Does he have  a magical exemption from the Lifetime Pension Cap, or what ?

For believers in omens, this is surely a good one.  I was sitting moodily in the canteen thinking to myself that I hadn't seen the Canary Wharf seal in MONTHS when up rushed one of my colleagues (they know I am a seal fan)  brandishing a mobile phone to show me a video he took on 31st December, outside Henry Addington's bar mid-afternoon (well it WAS New Year's Eve), showing the seal swimming around merrily on the surface and EATING A DUCK.  There were plenty of witnesses, most of whom can be heard moaning on the sound track about the fact that they can't get their cameras to work and then moaning even more when the seal finally disappears just as they start to film.  
It is a very good movie but unfortunately as we are both over a certain age we could not work out how to get the video off his camera so that I could post it here. (Maybe next week, when he's had time to ask his grandson for advice).    But it's got to be a good sign, or at least a sign of something, right ?  Does it mean that the recession is even affecting seals and they are going back to their natural food sources, huntin and fishin as in days of yore ?  On the other hand, has anybody ever heard of a seal eating a duck before ?  Is this not in fact a fat cat among seals ?  Has he eaten all the available fish ?   Anyway, at least the seal hasn't deserted us, which has to be a good thing.  I'm sure the ancient Romans would know what to make of it.  

just when you thought it couldn't get any worse ... woke up this morning to the roar of floodwaters rising in the river a few meters away, turned on the radio and heard that banks worldwide were struggling with yet another disaster.  And just like the muddy, sewage-laden brown water threatening to float our garden away, the mess the  banks are floundering in is totally of our own devising - a simple pyramid scheme gone wrong, not unlike the ever-escalating consequences of decades of carbon emissions now becoming all too apparent, as a quick look out of the window showed.  

Not long ago someone at a party called me a Fat Cat because I work for a bank.  (I'm not the one who has three houses, I thought, but didn't say).  But when you hear Nicola Horlick explaining to her investors that their exposure to the latest scam was actually a good thing because